Alle reden vom Krieg, wir reden vom Klima

In our series Nothing makes sense except in evolution’s light, we also naturally look at the ongoing climate catastrophe from an evolutionary perspective: For the last 12,000 years, oxygen-producing plants and breathing organisms upheld a stable carbon dioxide cycle that guaranteed an equally stable climate. The Holocene, the home of human civilisation. But then our fossil hunger uprooted the planetary carbon balance: Over the course of a mere 200 years, we abruptly catapulted the additional carbon dioxide, filtered from earth’s atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years by jungles and proto-algae, back into the atmosphere. More than 80 percent of this during the last 30 years. At this moment, 40 gigatons too many are released into the atmosphere annually. From the perspective of evolutionary deep time, this resembles a carbon dioxide explosion.

We still lack the technology to reclaim all this from the atmosphere, despite feverishly conducting research on artificially mimicking the wonder that is photosynthesis. Until we may perhaps succeed in this, vast parts of our continents will be devastated, becoming uninhabitable for mammals. And this will happen in the foreseeable future. We are deep into the sixth mass extinction event, also called defaunation: 1,000 species disappear annually. By now, humans form 35 percent of animal biomass on Earth. Our livestock and pets make up more than half of all vertebrates with 58 percent. The share of animals living in the wild on land and in the oceans has already shrunk to 5 percent.
We were smart enough to make the natural cycle collapse. But are we smart enough to let it recover?
The solutions to the climate crisis are here: Energy transition, thermal transition, transportation transformation. But their implementation faces tenacious defeat at the level of political willingness. With gas lobbyist and minister of economy Katharina Reiche, many hard-won successes of the climate movement are dialled back. What do we need now? Is there still cause for hope, and if so, why, when, and how?

We pose these questions to Dr Bernhard Kegel, author of Mit Pflanzen die Welt retten – grüne Lösungen gegen den Klimawandel (Rescuing the Planet with Plants – Green Solutions against Climate Change), and Mara Kleine, FRIDAYS FOR FUTURE activist since 2019. In conversation with Matthias Polte, Bernhard Kegel and Mara Kleine gauge the options listed in Kegel’s book and which the young FRIDAYS FOR FUTURE generation currently points out.